The present invention relates to card games, and more particularly poker-like card games played with cards whose values are not known with certainty during the round. The present invention also relates to in-game (also called in-progress or real-time) betting games based on live sporting events, and more particularly poker-like in-game betting games that are based on live sporting events. The game of the present invention can be played on a web site over the internet, or in a physical location like a sports bar or casino.
The ancestry of modern poker goes back at least 1000 years. Poker-like games were played by Chinese emperors in the 10th century. The modern deck of cards used for modern poker (and other card games, like bridge) also has ancient roots. A game called Primero, played in Spain in the 16th century is often called “poker's mother”. By the 17th and 18th century there were games called “Pogue” in French, and “Pochen” in German, that can be directly linked to the modern poker games.
A key aspect of poker and poker-like games is the bluff. A bluff is a wager (often large) made by a player with a poor hand. The object of a bluff is to fool the opponent players into thinking the bluffer's hand is, in fact, good. That way, an opponent with a better hand may drop out of the round (i.e., fold) allowing the bluffer to win. On the Mississippi River boats of the 19th century, poker-like games were referred to as “cheating games”, no doubt because bluffing appears on the surface to be a type of cheating. But it is not. Bluffing is, in fact, a subtle strategy that every good poker player must understand. Twentieth century mathematicians, like John Von Neumann, were able to calculate the optimal bluffing strategies for simple poker-like games. But for the popular poker games, like Stud Poker and Texas Hold'em, the optimal strategies are too complex to analyze mathematically, so the best human players are better than any computer “player”. In that sense, modern poker is a more difficult strategy game than chess.
Today, when one speaks of poker, one is referring to a collection of games (Texas Hold'em, Stud Poker, Draw Poker, etc.) that are played with a standard 52 card deck. The present invention is a “poker-like” game in that it involves bluffing of the same sort used in poker games, and therefore it is a game of skill that involves the same sorts of subtle strategies as poker.
The present invention is also a type of in-game sports betting (also called in-progress betting and real-time betting in other contexts). Traditional sports betting involves players making bets based on the outcome of a sporting event before said sporting event begins. In-game sports betting allows players to place bets on outcomes associated with a sporting events while said sporting event is in progress. While poker and poker-like games have been around for centuries, in-game betting is a much more recent phenomenon. In-game sports betting systems of two types can be found in the prior art. There are fixed-odds systems where a player knows what his payoff will be if he wins when he makes his bet, and there are parimutuel systems where the payoffs the players receive on winning bets are based on how much was wagered on each choice, and is not known precisely until the betting line closes.
There are many examples of variants of traditional poker. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,836,553, (“Poker game”, Suttle, et. al.) discloses a variant of poker that is designed to be played in a casino against the house. However, the game uses traditional poker cards and house-initiated betting rounds. There is no poker or poker-like game in the prior arts that uses a deck of cards where the values of the cards depend on external events whose outcomes are not known with certainty while the rounds are in progress. There is also no poker or poker-like game known in the art that is dependent on a live sporting event. There is also no similar poker or poker-like game in the prior arts that features asynchronous and unstructured betting rounds.
There are also examples of in-game sports betting systems in the prior art. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,341,517, (“Real-time interactive wagering on event outcomes”, Asher, et. al.) discloses a method for placing bets on a variety of types of betting events in real time over the internet. However, the sports bets are traditional fixed odds spread-bet types, and not based on a poker or poker-like game. There is no known in-game betting system based on a poker or poker-like game, so the prior art does not disclose any method for conducting an in-game sports betting operation based on a poker or poker-like game.
In view of the foregoing, it would be desirable to have a poker-like game that is played during a live event, preferably a live sporting event, and that cannot be played in the absence of a live event. It would also be desirable to have a poker-like game where the cards and hands are of uncertain value during the rounds of the game, and are not known exactly until the end of the round, and to have a poker-like game where the betting is asynchronous and unstructured. It would also be desirable to have a poker-like game that could be used to conduct an in-game sports betting operation. It would also be desirable to have a poker-like in-game sports betting game that can serve as a basis of new kinds of tournaments and contests that take place during live sporting events. It is believed that these modifications result in a fundamentally new type of poker-like game and a fundamentally new kind of sports betting.